With its opulent production values, period setting and upstairs-downstairs plotting, Victoria is shaping up to be a Downton Abbey-sized success for the commercial broadcaster.

The connections continue with the casting of Dame Diana Rigg as the Duchess of Buccleuch, a disapproving matriarch highly reminiscent of the one Dame Maggie Smith played throughout Downton’s six series.

“We were so thrilled she agreed to come on board,” smiles Goodwin. “I was basically writing Lady Bracknell [from The Importance of Being Earnest], and there was really only one person to play her.”

The veteran actress, she continued, “brings a certain asperity to the screen and the set” and insisted on a bottle of Prosecco at the end of each day’s shooting.

“She drinks one glass and shares the rest with the make-up ladies,” says Goodwin of an actress whose casting as Victoria’s Mistress of the Robes follows her role as Olenna Tyrell in HBO’s Game of Thrones.

Victoria may lag behind that show in the blood and thunder stakes, but there’s no doubting audiences have taken it to their hearts.

The first series drew an average audience of 7.7 million viewers and was sold to 350 territories worldwide, the United States included.

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Dame Judi Dench will be seen again as the queen in Victoria and Abdul

Its subject is very much in the zeitgeist this autumn. Not only do we have Jenna Coleman as the young queen on television, but we also have Dame Judi Dench as the older version in Victoria and Abdul.

Dame Judi previously played Victoria in 1997’s Mrs Brown, as did Emily Blunt in 2009’s The Young Victoria – another dramatisation of the sovereign’s early years.

“It’s a great escapist treat but it’s also a mirror to our times,” says executive Damien Timmer when asked to account for the continued appeal of period dramas about the great, the good and the regal.

“We relate to the life we see and the fact that human nature fundamentally doesn’t change.”